So last night, I found out that my mother reads my postings, which I never expected or thought about so...Hi Mom. This doesn't mean that I am going to sensor my thoughts or that I don't think her hearing still needs to be checked. (just kidding, I AM JUST JOKING MOM).
Last night we saw Wicked, which was pardon the pun, wicked. The leads were very powerful especially the wicked witch of the west. Boy, could that green girl belt it out. It almost made me whistful and wanting to quite my life at the infernal office of PG for musical theatre school in New York. I would be the oldest chick there, out of shape, furiously trying to learn how to tap dance and sing on key. I said almost. I am still pondering ditching the working world for life on range. I would make an excellent cattle rancher. OR I could become a professional vagabonder just like this guy Rolf Potts. He just travels around the world and writes about it. Not such a bad gig.

Road House... I liked this Friedlander photo. It makes me want to start singing, "Home, home on the range. Where the deers and the antelope play. Where seldom is heard a discouraging word, and skies are not cloudy all day." Oops the skies are a bit cloudy.

MMMMM BOP

Finally, NPR became wise to the Ditty Bops, a old timey, new timey, great timey band...
Check out their NPR interview or go straight to their website which is neat ( a word quite understated and not used enough in my opinion). They were also on Praire Home Companion with good old Garrison (the breather) a while back and according to the interview they will be on the breather's show once again. I just wanted to share.

I went to the Central Library tonight for a reading by participants of the PEN mentorship program, "Emerging Voices." One of my former classmates Lan read her piece. It was so honest. She is one of those amazing people that effortlessly networks, talking to people (I mean really talking with people and not half listening and head bobbing) and following through with promises. She is going places. You just feel it when you hear her - it's exciting.

I love the library, especially the downtown library, talk about a shrine to books. There are so many rooms you need to take the tour to find where you want to go and how to exit when you want to leave.
Last night I did something silly. I emailed Andrei Codrescu and asked him to be my mentor. I mean really we have so much in common, NPR, Romania, Judaism - really if that's not enough to connect two people together than I don't know what is. I probably will never hear back from him. So, I have been fixating on this blind date gone wrong - and it's just not healthy. Was I boring. Is that what made him yawn. You see I didn't want to write anything because immediately I sound like a whining insecure girl (which maybe I am) and not the dashing, daring young woman of the 21st century (which maybe I am not). Screw self pity. HE missed out big time. I would make an excellent second date. IN fact I am convinced that the more dates with me the better. There are some people, just like fine wines, they need to be aired out a bit. It's been a whopping three plus years. ouch. Alright enough emotional ranting. Here is to libraries and the smell of freshly cracked books, NPR, old timey, new timey music, and blind dates. May there be more of each of them.

Despite the laws of nature, Cosmopolitan magazine and every other women's rag out there aging doesn't happen gradually. It happens all at once, like a lightening bolt out of the sky. You blink and then your body has deteriorated into a giant puddle and you don't even know what hit you. I was in Vegas this weekend for my Nana's 80th birthday and for the first time I realized she and my Poppop are getting old. I know you must be thinking, "Duh, Nina, she is turning 80." But they have never seemed feeble until this trip. They have slowed down to a crawl. My grandfather nows uses a walker. Both of their minds are still as sharp as tacks (thank god for that), that is when my grandmother can hear you. It made me sad. Sad and irritable. I think my father would argue that Vegas itself is what made me sad and irritable. But it was seeing them getting older which inevitably made me think about my parents growing older and you could see how thoughts could carry on in a depressing direction. My mother is slowly but surely losing her hearing (she insists that it is selective hearing, and it may be, but all the same she yells out "what?" a heck of a lot more frequently) and my father now has to take cholestoral medication. I know it is just the natural progression of life but it always seems to happen in moments. The world shifts one way or another and suddenly time telescopes and you are left with big chunks of it, bound by certains memories...such as childhood, college, my twenties. I don't know if this makes sense. Perhaps I am just getting mopey because my 26th birthday is around that corner meaning I am closer to thirty that 20. Somehow I never thought that I would be 26. I say this every year. I should just enjoy it, right? In the spirit of getting older... here is a sappy song.
More songs melancholy(or not so melancholic) and wonderful...
Warren Zevon
Tim McGraw
Patty Griffin